Adele, Katy Perry help music sales go up for the first time in seven years

At the halfway point of 2011, it shouldn’t be surprising that Adele’s 21is the top-selling album of the year. But did you know that thanks to that big boost, alongwith solid entries by the likes of Lady Gaga and Mumford & Sons, album sales are actually up for the first time in seven years?

According to the mid-year report published by Nielsen SoundScan, a few more than 155 million albums have moved in the first six months of 2011, compared to the just under 154 million that sold during the same time in 2010. That’s a whopping one percent gain!

It’s always good to be up, but considering album sales have been in total freefall for years (at this time last year, sales were down 11 percent compared to the same time in 2009), there was really no place to go but up.

There are some real reasons to celebrate, though. In the same week that Eminem’s Recovery became the first album to sell over a million digital copies, overall digital track sales are up 11 percent over last year. The first part of 2011 also marks the first time that a song has sold over four million digital copies in six months, and it actually happened twice (if you guessed Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and Katy Perry’s “E.T.,” give yourself a pat on the back for not being in a coma this year).

There are other signs of life too, as catalog sales are up seven percent (meaning that people are just as interested in old music as they are in new stuff) and vinyl sales are up a whopping 41 percent (which means that people also want to hear music on old technology). That vinyl figure is a little inflated, considering it only represents a hair under two million total big black discs sold, but the music industry will take what they can get.